• MALSORI
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• no.35_36
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• pp.131-143
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• 1998

This study describes an algorithm for the F0 contour generation system for Korean sentences and its evaluation results. 400 K-ToBI labeled utterances were used which were read by one male and one female announcers. F0 contour generation system uses two classification trees for prediction of K-ToBI labels for input text and 11 regression trees for prediction of F0 values for the labels. Evaluation results of the system showed 77.2% prediction accuracy for prediction of IP boundaries and 72.0％ prediction accuracy for AP boundaries. Information of voicing and duration of the segments was not changed for F0 contour generation and its evaluation. Evaluation results showed 23.5Hz RMS error and 0.55 correlation coefficient in F0 generation experiment using labelling information from the original speech data.

• MALSORI
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• no.53
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• pp.75-92
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• 2005

Prosody Generation Based on C-ToBI Representation for Text-to-SpeechSeungwon Kim, Yu Zheng, Gary Geunbae Lee, Byeongchang KimProsody modeling is critical in developing text-to-speech (TTS) systems where speech synthesis is used to automatically generate natural speech. In this paper, we present a prosody generation architecture based on Chinese Tone and Break Index (C-ToBI) representation. ToBI is a multi-tier representation system based on linguistic knowledge to transcribe events in an utterance. The TTS system which adopts ToBI as an intermediate representation is known to exhibit higher flexibility, modularity and domain/task portability compared with the direct prosody generation TTS systems. However, the cost of corpus preparation is very expensive for practical-level performance because the ToBI labeled corpus has been manually constructed by many prosody experts and normally requires a large amount of data for accurate statistical prosody modeling. This paper proposes a new method which transcribes the C-ToBI labels automatically in Chinese speech. We model Chinese prosody generation as a classification problem and apply conditional Maximum Entropy (ME) classification to this problem. We empirically verify the usefulness of various natural language and phonology features to make well-integrated features for ME framework.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.1 no.1
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• pp.9-22
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• 2009

This paper first presents the author's personal view on the importance of modeling in scientific research in general, and then describes two of his works toward modeling certain aspects of human speech communication. The first work is concerned with the physiological and physical mechanisms of controlling the voice fundamental frequency of speech, which is an important parameter for expressing information on tone, accent, and intonation. The second work is concerned with the cognitive processes involved in a discrimination test of speech stimuli, which gives rise to the phenomenon of so-called categorical perception. They are meant to illustrate the power of models based on deep understanding and precise formulation of the functions of the mechanisms/processes that underlie observed phenomena. Finally, it also presents the author's view on some models that are yet to be developed.